1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates to a programming environment system, and, more particularly, to such a system capable of providing an optimal programming environment for customizing one or more existing applications to create a single new application.
2. Description of Related Art
With respect to a ready-made application, it is desirable and convenient to customize the application to be in tune with required work, given circumstances, and a particular user's preference. For example, there often arises cases where one or more applications are run following some routine procedure. If we could record such procedures as a single procedure, it would be possible to greatly alleviate a user's daily job burden.
However, the customization of an application requires a user to thoroughly master how to use the application concerned. Further, it should be noted that most editing languages are as difficult to use as standard programming languages, as exemplified by a customization language put forward by Richard M. Stallman in his articles, "Emacs: The Extensible, Customizable, Self-documenting Display Editor," Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA Symposium on Text Manipulation, 1981, Portland, pp. 147-156. Editing languages of this type unavoidably put a heavy burden on general users who lack experience in programming, in spite of their clear advantage in descriptive facilities. To alleviate such a burden on the users, it is desirable to provide techniques which can be used even by unsophisticated users who lack experience in programming.
The following technique which alleviates the burden on users is currently known: recording the user's actions as a sequence of events and then regenerating the sequence of events, as if the user inputs those events again. A technique of this type is also employed in Tempo II (A trademark of Affinity Inc., U.S.A.), an execution support tool by Affinity Inc., U.S., and. MacroMaker (utility name) of an operating system of Apple Inc., U.S.A.
With these conventional methods, however, customized applications are not necessarily easy for users to manipulate, in as much as recorded events are accessed through a label attached by a user or accessed with a function key assigned in advance to those recorded events.
Other conventional systems related to the present invention are: "Method to Provide Customization of an Application User Interface by an End User," IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 31, No. 1, June 1988, pp. 377-378; Japanese Patent Application No. 1-31277; Japanese Patent Application No. 1-184880; and U.S. Japanese Patent Application No. 7,267,420. However, the above references are only intended to customize the appearance of a user interface or appearance (panel) transition. As techniques for recording and regenerating user key strokes, there exists another conventional system i.e., "KEYSAVE/KEYUSE," IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin, Vol. 29, No. 7, December 1986, pp. 3157-3158.